Tech Field Day VFD3 – Turbonomic – turbo charging your IT operations

It’s time for us to wind down the week here at Tech Field Day: Virtualization Field Day 3. Having Turbonomic be our closer for the event was a great, invigorating way to excite the delegates and viewers. Turbonomic has an interesting story in how they are attacking the issues within IT operations, so here is a little bit that I picked up from the session.

The true value in IT is becoming more focused on shortening the time-to-market for delivery, increasing the value to the customer ($$$) and reducing the operational costs on both an intangible and tangible scale.

3 ways to play

The Turbonomic offering comes a few different product models based on how much you want to dive in with the suite.

Virtual Health Monitor (Free :)) is the monitor and report type of deployment to give you a sense of your density, and places you could improve. This is a great way to deploy on the “freemium” delivery model because the data center evaluation will ultimately derive how the next layer of the product could be an advantage to deploy.

There is the next step with the Enterprise Edition of Operations Manager which is the flagship product with the control and provisioning engine that is baked in to allow for not just a monitor and alert style of operations, but an active management and adaptive control platform to effectively turn your virtualization platform into more of a self-healing infrastructure.

Cloud Edition is another suite which allows you to dive into multi-tenant models with vCloud and CloudStack (OpenStack support coming in Q3 2013). This will be for more advanced deployments obviously, and unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to cover the content during our session so I will have to follow up with the team at Turbonomic and post on what my findings are there.

Stop fixing, start thinking – creating an intelligent data center

The value proposition coming from Turbonomic with their products is the idea of adding an intelligence engine into the data center. There will be some animated conversations that happen among your administration team over putting the value on the highly abstracted view which moves away from the more typical “close to the workload” operational monitoring and management that happens in most places today.

I am a strong proponent of implementing the DevOps model for every operation within IT and business where possible. This starts with transforming the way that traditional data center administrators and architects think about IT. First, everyone needs to latch on to the beautifully depicted 3 ways as written by Gene Kim: http://itrevolution.com/the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/

Turbonomic and the economic analytics

Remember that economics come in many forms. This is where the debate rises among various branches of IT and the business organization. If you watched the session with Turbonomic here at Virtualization Field Day 3, you will see a great example of the debate over how Turbonomic will come into play in today’s data center environments.

The value in adding the remediation and orchestration features of Turbonomic are sometimes challenging to see. Remember that it wasn’t too long ago that we said the same thing about “losing control” by running DRS, SRDS and other features in our VMware virtualization environments that are now widely accepted and used.

See it for yourself!

The only way to really understand what value can be gotten from Turbonomic Operations Manager is to download the demo and try out the free edition. It’s super easy to do right at http://go.vmturbo.com/cloud-edition-download.html and you can see some really slick metrics within just over an hour of deploying the OVF!

DISCLOSURE: Travel and expenses for Tech Field Day – Virtualization Field Day 3 were provided by the Tech Field Day organization. No compensation was received for attending the event. All content provided in my posts is of my own opinion based on independent research and information gathered during the sessions.